


grace when you turn to a ghost

by gumbridge



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Pale Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-22
Updated: 2011-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-26 10:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gumbridge/pseuds/gumbridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Signless meets his descendant in a dreambubble.<br/>Alternatively, <i>Signless: Fondly regard crustacean.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	grace when you turn to a ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Karkat is desperately, deeply pale for everybody he has ever met, and much the same goes for the Signless.
> 
> The teen rating is entirely for Karkat's foul tongue. Thanks to Vikki for the quick beta!

The Signless had known, of course, that he would have a descendant, one who would play the game in place of him. He'd never actually expected to _meet_ the kid. But there he is, sitting hunched knees-up on the floor in the corner of some steel-walled room. Black and grey on more grey, the only colour the orange of his rounded horntips peeking out through the wild uncombed snarls of his hair.

The steel floor, marching neat row after row, falls abruptly away to grass lit by two half-moons high overhead. The edge between the two is jagged, rough, and the metal digs into the Signless's heels as he steps across the border between memories. After so much time spent dreaming in the bubbles, time he doesn't know how to begin to count, he'd thought he had known the rule: no contact between people who hadn't shared memories. Maybe the rules were relaxed for ancestors and their descendants? Or maybe, since they were genetic twins, they were treated as the same person. Only the under-gods of Derse knew, and he'd been a Prospit troll since he'd first woken up.

His ancestor – descendant – the kid doesn't look up when he approaches. Still trapped in his loop of memories, maybe.

The Signless is wearing the clothing he wore on the day he died, thankfully from a few hours before his capture – scuffed but not bloodied, not yet: leggings and cherry-stitched cloak and soft boots that don't make any noise against the floor. The Signless drags his heels deliberately as he walks to give the kid some kind of warning, but he doesn't look up, face buried in his knees, arms wrapped around his calves, shoulders hitched up to his ears.

It is a pose of perfect despair, and something in the Signless's expanding and contracting vascular system twists at that, this tiny crumpled mass of troll who is/was/will-be him/not-him. He hunkers down into a crouch of his own and tries to modulate his voice into something comforting, like something he remembers from his youth with the Dolorosa.

"Hey, kid," he says, and his voice, always raspy, comes out gruff. He clears his throat, tries again.

"Kid. I don't know your name, sorry, or I'd use it. You did get a name, right? Provisions were supposed to be made, but who even knows how many sweeps it's been between your asteroid ride to Alternia and mine, and who even knows what's fallen apart between then and now."

The kid doesn't look up, but his shoulders hike up even further, and he whispers something into his knees. The Signless leans closer to hear it, but makes sure not to get close enough to touch – it's a bad idea to get within clawing distance of any distressed troll, even the youngest wiggler. He frowns when he manages to make out what the kid is saying, two words repeated over and over again until they bleed into each other, slur into incoherence.

"'Go away'? There's no way I'm leaving you alone in a death dream, kid." The Signless wants to gather him up in his arms, hold the kid till he's torn free from this shitty memory, till he's calm. He tries to think back on how the Dolorosa dealt with him when he was upset, considers the possible, obvious dangers, discards them, and reaches out a tentative hand to stroke through the kid's hair.

The second his hand touches hair, the kid is jerking backwards, fast enough and far enough to smack the back of his head — and, ouch, the side of one horn — into the steel wall. His eyes are _huge_ , shit, yellow as cluckbeast-ovulation yolk, and his irises haven't turned red yet; he can't have reached even seven sweeps yet. The Signless would spend a lot more time thinking about that if the kid's hands weren't filled, between one moment and the next, with two wickedly curved sickles straight from the memory of a sylladex.

The Signless's own palms and strong scarred fingers itch for his old weapons, black and white and murder all over, but he will not draw on this scrawny kid, all knees and elbows and panicked defences. He's just . . . sad, just another dead troll, another grievance to lay against the Empire, or the game, or (synonymous with it), the Signless's own failure.

"Who are you," the kid grates out, eyes tracking up and down, looking for the caste symbol he won't find.

The Signless spreads his hands, palms up, in as slow and reassuring a manner as possible. "Your ancestor, kid, 'least as far as I can tell."

The kid's hands tense, sharp orange nails digging into the wrapping around the sickles' handles. "Ancestors are just blueblood superstition, shitass, so why don't you try that line on some high-blooded nooksniffer who'll believe you. Who are you, and what the fuck are you doing in my dream bubble?"

"Didn't you create twenty-four grubs in the labs?" asks the Signless. His hood falls further across his face and he doesn't move to shift it. "Twenty-four, when your session had twelve players? Didn't you _think_ , kid?"

He can see the kid's eyes widen between one panic-fast heartbeat and the next as what he's hearing sinks in. Here's an adult, he's thinking, who knows about the game; no way of knowing how he knows, no way to prove he's not out for some dreambubble wiggler torture.

To forestall any further dramatics, he reaches out and pushes his hand onto the blade of one of the kid's sickles, the sharp pink metal digging into the meat of his palm. He's in and out before the kid can move – no matter how good the kid is at this age, he's too scared to think straight, too confused to react properly – and then he's showing his palm, just like before, a gesture of peace this time adorned by the blood beading in his hand, sinking into the grooves and whorls of his skin.

The kid's eyes lock onto it, then dart down to the blood-smeared sickle, then back up again. The Signless can see questions forming in his face, angry desperate sentences starting with _how_ — or why— or _you_ —, and he heads those off by reaching up with his clean hand to pull his hood off, carefully working around the horns. His hair tufts up around his ears, and the crown of his head prickles in the sudden contact with the cool air.

The kid's shoulders straighten up, spine losing some of its defensive curve as he gets distracted with cataloguing the Signless's face, similarities between the two of them too obvious to ignore: the nose, the shape of the eyes, the thin curl of the lips. His legs relax minutely, knees lowering just enough to let the Signless get a glimpse at the symbol on his shirt: the same one the Signless took for his own, no colour but the same grey, grey, grey of his skin, the walls around them, the metal that had bound the Signless's wrists his last night on Alternia.

"So you maybe want to tell me your name so I can stop calling you _kid_?" the Signless asks, tone deliberately as light and casual as he can make it. He's made hundreds and hundreds of one-on-one personal pleas to every sort of troll from the lowest rustblood slave working in a hoofbeast slaughterpit to Her Imperial Goddamn Fucking Condescension herself, and he doesn't think he's ever been this scared.

The kid relaxes his hand on the grip of one sickle, lets it disappear back into the pocket-space of his sylladex. He keeps the bloody one in between them, knuckles pale and tendons stiff. "Karkat Vantas," he says, eventually, like he doesn't trust that it won't come back to bite him in the bony grey ass.

The Signless smiles at that, real pleasure in getting this small measure of trust from the kid, and Karkat just tenses right back up at the sight of the Signless's teeth. He masters his face and says, "Vantas, huh? So you did get a caste designation after all; I'm glad. There were supposed to be preparations made, but I didn't exactly get to stick around to make sure. —Did you get a lusus, kid? Karkat?"

"Of course I fucking _got_ a lusus," Karkat says, wariness not enough to shake the withering tone from his voice. "Every goddamn grub on the planet gets a lusus."

"I didn't," says the Signless, keeping his tone light as possible. "My caretaker was an adult troll."

"Like a human parent," says Karkat, and okay, the Signless has absolutely no idea what those two last words there mean, but he can ignore them for now; the dream bubble landscape is going blurry around the edges and the Signless wants to make sure the next memory they visit is one of his.

"She was one of the jade-bloods who serve the Mother Grub," the Signless says, trying to talk fast, trying to keep his tone smooth; "She found me in a crater and brought me to the surface, built this shitty little ramshackle hive that she covered all over in plants—"

And, success: the landscape has shifted, steel under their feet fading to the scrubby sort of dirt found at the edge of the great continental desert. There's the tiny two-room hive the Signless remembers, dry winding vines climbing up the cracked clay of its walls, roof tiled with spiky little bushes that kept the cool in during the hot seasons' long days.

Karkat scrambles up from his crouch, right hand still filled with sickle, left hand clenching itself into a fist.

This night's a cool one, forty-eight sacred constellations shining bright and lovely above the wasteland. The Signless isn't sure which night it is, what sweep and which perigee, but right now he doesn't really care. The sight of the place is enough to make Karkat pause, look around, hopefully shake some of the lingering death-terror out of his head.

There's not much noise out here, the night windless and still, and the two of them stand there watching until – maybe ten long minutes later – a figure exits the hive's aperture onto the lawnring, a woven basket balanced on one spare hip. She's dressed all in neatly patched green and black, and her pale skin nearly glows in the light of the twin moons, pink against one cheek, green against the other.

Beside him, Karkat startles: " _Kanaya_ ," he says, the name pained in his mouth, and takes a step forward. The Signless claps a hand onto his shoulder to stop his progress. His hand looks very broad against Karkat's shoulder, so thin and bowed. Sandy dirt rolls downslope from under their feet.

"That isn't Kanaya," he says, voice low. "If they look so similar, perhaps this is Kanaya's ancestor – but I knew this troll as the Dolorosa. She's the one who raised me."

Karkat shrugs off the Signless's hand and hunches further into himself. He stares at the ground. "Kanaya was my best friend. One of my best friends. She's dead now, and it was my fault. I thought I'd be able to see her again in a bubble."

In the distance, the Dolorosa bends, elegant, to the ground. Searching for edible greenery, probably; survival had never been easy, on the edge of nowhere. They'd managed.

"You may still see her," the Signless says, slow. "There are more memories than you'd think, floating around. She may even have survived, and you'll see her when she sleeps."

Karkat's eyebrows knit together at that. Further together. There hasn't yet been a moment that the Signless has seen Karkat's brow smooth like it ought to be at his age. "She got a fucking _hole_ blown through her fucking _gut_ — because of _my_ failure as team leader — and you want to tell me she could still be _alive_?"

The memory's shifting before the Signless can stop it, and they're back in the grey steel labs, in a wide room, and the Karkat of this memory is kneeling, face pink with tears and drained bloodless and pale underneath it, by the jade-stained corpse of a girl who couldn't be anyone but the Dolorosa's descendant. The Karkat next to the Signless has his arms folded tight around his chest and his expression has turned inward, self-loathing, caught in a loop of guilt and blame. Again. _God damn it_.

"So this never happened in your timeline, huh," Karkat says, voice gone harsh and twisting. "No showboating seadweller douchecanoes murdering your troll lusus-parent in cold — _hah_ — blood."

"If it did, it was after I died," says the Signless. "It can't have been easy at all for any of my companions after my execution, but when the Dolorosa went, I hope to fuck it was in a somewhat less shitty way."

"Execution," Karkat repeats. "So you were culled."

"What, they don't schoolfeed wigglers history any more? That's what happens when you get caught leading a revolution against the Empire and hemoarchy in the name of peace. It was a pretty big deal. They forged the irons _special_."

Karkat looks sideways at him. "Are you aware that you are completely fucking delusional, or do you maybe think that I'm the most gullible chump this side of paradox space." His voice is completely level. Beyond him, the memory-Karkat is pulling a gawky yellowblood onto the transportalizer pad, silent reenactment of past horror. The Signless doesn't really like talking about his failure of a revolution, but if it distracts Karkat, then maybe he can deal.

"I'm not shitting you on this," the Signless says, exactly as mild as musclebeast milk isn't. "You had a sign, you had a lusus, but I guess this is one inheritance you never got. I'll give you the grand tour: c'mon."

He shows Karkat the whole thing, from messy beginnings to ignoble finale. It takes a while, but time's one thing they've got to spare, here after the end of things. Karkat's mouth tightens out into a barely visible line. He goes paler and paler, and quieter and quieter. He stops talking entirely after they get to the Signless's first meeting with the Psiioniic and sees the new and old scars layered thickly over the delicate bones of his wrists, the welts raised on his bare forearms.

They step through memory together and watch the end of it, till past the end of it, when the irons have at last cooled to match the grey of the Signless's skin, wherever it isn't black with char or red with blood. The sun is rising and the despite the warning heat of it Karkat is shivering, brow knotted and fingers pale, pale grey against his long sleeves.

The Signless never wore sleeves, no extra cloth to hide the flow of blood on the soft underside of his arms.

"You did so fucking much," says Karkat, abrupt. "You helped – you helped _so many_ people. It wasn't fair that you didn't win."

His fingers are twisting, digging into one another.

"You helped people too," the Signless says, gentle. He draws the boy with him as they walk and the scenery fades from Imperial killing-ground back to the dry brush of the field of his pupation: the deep gods of the Outer Ring are feeling generous, or else restive, tonight. The paired moons are high and sweet in the sky, and they tinge the night their colours.

The Signless sinks down to sit cross-legged on the ground, and Karkat follows, more wobbly collapse than elegant descent.

"You kept your band of eleven other angry trolls together long enough to nearly win this game; that's not too shabby for a kid all of, what, six sweeps?"

"Not good enough," Karkat says. He's glaring at a hole in the toe of one ragged shoe like he could fix it with sheer rage if he just tried. "We _didn't_ win, and we just fell apart like a fucking — god damn, like one of my own indescribably shitty overwrought metaphors. We fell apart because I couldn't keep us together and then everyone _died_ because I couldn't stop Eridan or Vriska or Gamzee and especially not Jack." His voice cracks on the last phrase and he scrubs a hand over his scalp, yanking at his hair.

"If I had thought, if I had planned ahead, if I had just acted quicker when we were supposed to go into the new universe we made. If I had taken the fucking time to do the frog thing right and not ended up fucking creating Jack in the first place, this would never have happened. If past, present, and future mes had proved to not be all incompetent at everything they ever fucking tried their pathetic hands at. If I hadn't been such a miserable fucking goddamn puling weak-ass _shitpanned_ wiggler idiot who could not find his own gluteal muscles with both hands, a rump-detector machine and a fucking colour-fucking-coded fucking map."

"Hey, now," says the Signless, and goes to cover Karkat's hands with his own. They're tense, cold to the touch, and incredibly, terrifyingly small under the Signless's own palms. "Shh, kid. It didn't go all right, but I'm sure it didn't go all wrong, either. You did your best, and nobody could've expected more of you."

" _They should have_ ," Karkat wails, actually _wails_ , voice ragged. His shoulders are hunched and his spine is bowed and he is shaking from toenail to horntip, and this scares the Signless so much he can't see straight.

"Hush, kid," he says, hurried, almost babbling— "at least you didn't fuck up so bad you had to scratch your session, right? I mean, you had victory within your reach. You came as close as you could with a rigged game."

Something in Karkat freezes at that, knuckles pricking sharp and tense. " _Rigged_ ," he says, and his voice is a blade.

The Signless rubs small circles into Karkat's thin wrists, trying to gentle him, remembering the Disciple's way with wild beasts. "Shush," he says, and taps his thumbs up and down, once, twice. "More than the game. Alternia's whole history, glory be to the Empire and her lusus-fucking witch-mistress of a Condesce."

Karkat goggles at the casual profanity, treason and blasphemy all wrapped up together in one fatal package, should a patriot or blueblood hear. His eyebrows are somewhere near his hairline, and he doesn't seem capable of speech. At least he seems distracted from his self-loathing.

"I had dreams, when I was alive. No incoherent dreambubble hoofbeastshit, not normal troll dreams. Memory-dreams of an earlier Alternia, one without the violence and cruelty. Without an Empress. Had something called a parliament instead. Still not sure what that was, but it probably wasn't anything to do with hootbeasts. I played the game in that timeline, me and eleven other trolls. We didn't even come close to winning."

Karkat shifts, resettling his vertebrae. His eyes are sharp, the thin skin under them pulled tight. "And what did this gaming loss of your made-up asshole dreamselves result in."

His voice isn't nearly as scathing as he must think it is, and his hunched shoulders are so thin, so like a wingbeast's. He is a multi-carred locomotive wreck after the fact, fires out and smoke blown away, water seeping into every rusted cabin, and the Signless is paler than the ghost of a lusus for him, deep and sudden like the riptide. The Signless has always felt pale for the whole world, all of Alternia in its fucked-up ruin of potential, every single member of its star-spanning Empire. He is paler for Karkat Vantas.

"We made a deal with the devil," says the Signless. His head tips up and he stares, bleary, at the sky. It's lightening; maybe dawn's coming on, fake dreambubble memory of a sunrise. The sand shifts, sliding away from underneath him. "Or, hell, maybe an angel? Something like that. We bargained — _I_ bargained, I won't pretend it wasn't entirely my fault — for a do-over. For Alternia to be a world that would grant a real shot at success for the next group to play. Not us, but the trolls who'd been our ancestors."

Karkat's eyes shoot up to the Signless's face. The Signless can practically hear his mind working, the insectile chitter-and-buzzing of machinery going doubletime. His shoulders jerk back; his arms follow. The Signless doesn't follow; his eyelids shutter themselves against the growing light, and his hands lie useless in his lap, no longer bloody now that he's stopped concentrating on the sickle-cut on one palm.

"If what you're spewing isn't a communal hivestem load gaper system's worth of putrid trollshit, you are saying that everything — literally _every last shit-stinking single thing_ — wrong with the world is your fault. Every injustice, every wrong done by trollkind to any individual in any solar system the Condesce's exploratory fleet has reached. You are saying that you held the sack of shit over this universe's horned head and decided to tip it over. You are claiming _personal_ responsibility for this."

The Signless wants nothing more than to close his eyes, and he will not lie to himself and say it is because of the light. Karkat Vantas is a dagger, an auger digging into the core of him, a sacriphysician's lance ready to spill blood and judge its hue wanting.

"You ancient, unbearably arrogant, _unbelievably_ pitiful piece of calcified manure," he says, and his voice is so gentle it hurts.

The Signless's head snaps up. The sun directly overhead doesn't burn, even with his hood puddled around his neck, but he doesn't pay any attention to it. He stares at Karkat, Karkat with the bruise-dark smudges under his eyes, the thin bowed shoulders, the deep-dug furrow between his brows that makes him look so young and so, so old.

"You claim I played a rigged game and can't be blamed for losing, but you're not even considering the demon or angel did the same to you," Karkat says. His nails pick, pick, pick at the hem of his shirt, pulling out thin black threads, and his eyes are furious, intense. "There is no way you were given a fair chance in whatever bullshit world before, as by your own words you were left pants-shittingly, _screamingly_ unprepared by your playpen of a world with all the corners sanded off, and there is no way you were given a fair deal at the end of it. Basically the only thing I see you being able to actually fault yourself for is being a credulous little wiggler when bargaining with something older and more canny than yourself, and that wasn't even _this_ you, if you're to believed, which I would likely be proving my own self to be an even bigger chump than you by doing. Which would be an act so impressive, the Condesce herself would commission a statue of me doing the credulous wiggler obeisance for stupid idiots, and she would put that statue on the prow of her battleship. I would become the laughingstock of _galaxies_ , and it would be on your conscience alone."

The Signless had learned to control his expressions, sweeps and sweeps ago in the high-skied desert, and now he is grateful for that. Karkat is staring at him, intense and full of bright awful pity, his own hurts completely forgotten. He is admirable and pitiful in his laser focus and the Signless wants to know how much more he could have accomplished, had he been the one on the meteor landing in the Dolorosa's time, he and not the Signless. He has nothing to say and no idea how this whole situation got out of his control so badly, so _fast_.

Something moves in the corner of his vision, something unaccounted for by the low brush and scrub and dune of their patch of desert, and he looks up. Karkat's gaze follows his own, follows it to see, bizarrely, a small pink hive built out of flaking blocks of baked clay, with wide-open windows and a line of damp clothes in every imaginable colour strung between two poles. The sun is pale and warm, not roasting but gently drying the clothing, and the light entirely fails to sting the Signless's eyes. There's a grey figure dressed all in dusty red tending to the line, weight resting on a single foot, hair messily tucked through wide, spiralling horns. Whoever it is is standing on grass, and the sand from Karkat and the Signless's patch of desert spills gently onto it, green buried by bone-paleness.

"Aradia," says Karkat, but he sounds confused. "Not _my_ timeline's Aradia."

"Not mine either," says the Signless; "I never met an Aradia, and in case you haven't noticed, this isn't either of our Alternias."

Karkat stares, not at the Signless but at everything else, the soft worn humps of the land, taking in every detail. "Your dream Alternia. The old one, before."

The Signless nods once, slow. "The light or the building or the grass, something about this is familiar. I can't be sure, I never left my own timeline in the bubbles and my real dreams were always fuzzy, like a badly programmed game grub, but — something about this is pulling at me."

Karkat's dragged his lower lip between his teeth, biting it light, so careful not to draw blood. Everything about him is locked up, his posture, his expression.

The door to the little hive opens and both Karkat and the Signless have, immediately, a sickle in each hand. A figure walks out, carrying a tall basket. This figure is dressed in not greys and blacks, nothing from the hemospectrum either, but faded blue jeans and a shockingly scarlet shirt. There's a pair of horns just emerging from a tangle of black hair, and they have rounded tips.

This troll doesn't have fangs, but flat front teeth barely showing at all. This troll looks totally relaxed, totally unscarred, like they haven't felt a night's terror in their life. He doesn't do the wary glance around the environment for hostile trolls or beasts that should be fucking _standard_ for every person hatched on Alternia.

The troll calls out to not-Aradia, a friendly greeting, and his voice is a perfect, impossible match for Karkat's.

Karkat stows his sickles in his sylladex, puts a hand out, and lets himself sink down. He is shaking, _hard_ , and the Signless knows he would be too, if he hadn't been bracing himself for this precise shock.

Karkat rubs at his eyes with thin grey fingers. He looks terribly, painfully, older than the moons themselves.

"Is this what you dreamed about?" His voice is low, full of some distant relation to despair.

"Never this specific scene, but generally: yes." The Signless crouches, grey cloak sweeping up grains of sand, and finally lets himself reach out and cradle Karkat in his arms. Karkat quakes beneath him for long, long moments, then clutches the rough fabric of the cloak so hard his knuckles creak.

"How could you ever bear to wake up?" Karkat asks, voice bleak as bones. In the distance, the two not-trolls are smiling, chatting, eyes crinkled up with contentedness. It's so hard just to look away from them.

"I had a job to do," the Signless says, smoothing a hand over the delicate roundness of Karkat's skull, hair coarse under his palm. "Dreams of this place were what gave me the impetus to try my shit-awful quarter-cocked revolution. I wanted Alternia to be like it should have been."

The Signless keep stroking Karkat's hair, keeps murmuring, _hush, shush._ Karkat's shivering slows and, at length, stops.

"And you were the only troll who remembered this iteration of the world," says Karkat, and his voice is low and clogged thick with snot, but it somehow also manages to throb with pity.

"Hey, kid, in case you didn't notice, I'm built like a goddamn brick shithive, my shoulders are plenty broad enough for this." The Signless tries to keep his voice light, cheery. He wants to raise his voice to drown out the far-away sounds of the not-trolls, wants to shout and bellow till the universe realizes just how pitiful, just how _magnificent_ is Karkat Vantas. But he is all out of world-changing words, out of every sort of thing that matters: life, the world, time. The best he's got now is a constant useless susurrus of hushes and shushes.

Karkat untangles his knuckles, bony and nicked all over with sickle- and pincer-scars, from the Signless's cloak. He rotates his shoulders back, forth. "Look at them," he says, and flips a hand towards the not-trolls. His voice is full of something he probably wouldn't be able to admit is deep envy. "They're so _weak_. I'd put a whole boonbank on neither one knowing how to use a weapon. No fucking wonder they lost the game so bad, they look more pathetic than humans."

"I still have no idea what a human is," the Signless reminds Karkat.

Karkat startles at that. "No, huh? You didn't get the chance to meet any sort of alien assholes, you didn't play the game. I'm almost jealous."

Karkat pulls strength and bravado back into himself, into his voice. His posture straightens unconsciously. "Seems to me we've got nothing but an eternity to spend revisiting old shit in some fucking squidgods' ideas of ablution-trap foambubbles. So there is absolutely no need to stay here shedding the saddest, pinkest tears we will ever see over shit like this that didn't even fucking happen within the timeline of our own _universe_. You showed me yours, I'll show you mine, we'll get to jointly marvel over the complete wastes of blood that are human aliens."

The Signless smiles. Had he been that capable a leader, before his eyes even turned colours? "Lead the way, kid," he says.

The not-trolls still stand behind them, leaning now against the brick hive walls, feet dug into the bright green grass. The desert lies ahead, shifting with sand and mirage and the motion of the dreambubbles. Karkat scrambles, inelegant, to his feet. He shoves his chin forward, a demanding gesture.

"I've got no fucking clue how to navigate these spheres of fairy-spun fucking sopor-shit, ugh. But look, just on general principles, I'm going to say: no way out but through."

One beside another, they walk.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [pale as ghosts (the bad ideas and kindness remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/311317) by [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist)




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